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‘Knockout’ rats could aid study of psychiatric illness

LABORATORY mice beware&colon; the rats are coming. For more than a decade, researchers have studied “knockout mice”, engineered to lack certain genes, with the aim of studying diseases. Now a UK company is well on the way to making the first “knockout rats”.

On Tuesday, Stem Cell Sciences in Cambridge, UK, announced that it had created rats from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) using a technique similar to the one used to create knockout mice. The company isolated rat ESCs, implanted them in foster mothers and mated the resulting offspring with normal rats to produce rats with genes from the ESCs. …